Charlene Galarneau, faculty member in the Center for Bioethics and a senior lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine opines: Despite abundant evidence of racism’s health impacts, a key bioethics reference text barely acknowledges the problem.
Racism is fundamentally an ethical problem, so one might reasonably expect the field of bioethics — the primary venue for addressing ethical questions in health and health care — to grapple with it in substantive and meaningful ways. But if the field’s central reference text, the “Encyclopedia of Bioethics,” is any guide, the problem of racism in health care has yet to garner the level of concern that it warrants.
The dearth of attention to racism is itself a signal of a kind of racism, made worse by the fact that there is so much more the encyclopedia could — and should — be saying on this front.